For most COOs and operations leaders today, the role has evolved far beyond managing internal efficiency to an increasing focus on shaping customer outcomes and driving revenue. Especially in SaaS, where long-term growth hinges on customer retention, operations has become directly involved in customer success, particularly in onboarding and retention.
This is true for me, as COO, where part of my responsibility is ensuring customers achieve value early and consistently, because a strong customer experience is crucial to our company’s growth and sustainability.
At the recent Customer Success Week event in NYC, ChurnZero’s CEO You Mon Tsang highlighted how Customer Success Operations (CS Ops) is becoming essential for scaling customer success. Much like Sales Operations revolutionized sales efficiency and transformed the sales process into a key revenue driver, CS Ops is transforming onboarding into a structured, measurable process that accelerates value for both the customer and the business.
The rapid growth of CS Ops is fueled by businesses’ increasing focus on customer adoption and loyalty—not just as promises made during the sales cycle, but as actionable priorities to maximize lifetime value.
It remains as true as ever that retaining existing customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. So companies are investing in new and hardened strategies to ensure customers see value quickly, stay engaged, and build long-term relationships with the brand—starting with onboarding.
But unlike the empty promises of yesterday where these strategies were merely hoped-for-outcomes, businesses are taking ownership to proactively deliver the value and create the engaging experiences that result in adoption and loyalty and give customers a reason to stay.
This revitalized focus on customer success helps drive revenue stability and sustainable growth, making CS Ops an essential function in today’s competitive market.
I am a strong proponent that every team with the resources to do so should stand up a CS Ops team. But in any case, taking a look at CS through the lens of operational thinking is a critical value-add move than any leader can take.
The idea of CS as a function distinct from customer service is to be proactive. Though, customer success teams frequently find themselves in firefighting mode, addressing problems as they arise. Bringing the focus back to a proactive strategy allows us to break free from the reactive cycle and truly focus on driving customer success forward.
Emphasizing operational excellence lets us plan ahead, bringing in efficient processes, data insights, and the right technology to make customer success more effective and even scalable—all the things we as Ops leaders seek to do across the organization as a whole.
Operational leaders have a unique vantage point that lets us see where bottlenecks and inefficiencies are slowing processes down—inefficiencies that are often hard to spot for teams focused on immediate customer needs. The day-to-day hustle can narrow a team’s view, causing them to fixate on quick wins rather than tackling the bigger, underlying issues that might be holding growth back.
It’s essential to step back, assess these roadblocks, and find operational improvements that create a smoother path for customers and teams alike. By removing the all-too-common friction prevalent in B2B relationships and building scalable processes from day one of the relationship, we can equip customer-facing teams to work with more agility and impact.
With these operational improvements in place, customer-facing teams can work more efficiently and scale their impact without getting bogged down by daily firefighting. Instead of reacting to issues, they’re able to focus on the work that drives real value—building strategy, fostering relationships, and identifying opportunities for growth and expansion.
Customer success and onboarding have evolved beyond their traditional support roles—they’re now crucial drivers of revenue. No longer an afterthought, just like Sales and Marketing have secured their place in the boardroom, onboarding and Customer Success teams deserve the same recognition for their role in driving revenue through customer retention and expansion business.
An efficient onboarding process is directly linked to revenue growth, so it’s time to treat onboarding as foundational to company-wide goals. When we elevate onboarding specifically to this level, given it’s the make or break moment in retention, it’s no longer seen as a cost center, but as essential players in long-term growth and sustainability.
This shift, however, requires a strong operational prioritization, with credibility on par with Sales Ops and Marketing Ops. By handling data, managing backend processes, and ensuring operational efficiency, the CS Ops function provides the backbone that fuels CS leaders to bring data-driven onboarding insights to the boardroom—insights that highlight their impact on revenue and resonate with their C-level leader peers and board members.
As Customer Success teams focus on building strong relationships, operational leaders need to create a scalable, efficient infrastructure to ensure results. A big part of this is assessing the tools and processes in place, seeking answers to questions like, “Where are we losing time?” “Where are we losing revenue?” Whether it’s duplicate data entry, avoidable human errors, time-consuming follow-ups, manual workarounds, or 1:1 interactions that don’t scale, these inefficiencies hold growth back.
Automation and a streamlined tech stack can reveal these gaps, freeing up time and resources for CS teams to focus on what matters most—delivering real value to customers. The tech stack itself isn’t just a collection of tools; it’s the foundation of an effective onboarding process.
Choosing onboarding software that integrates seamlessly with existing business systems and avoids data silos is crucial, creating a cohesive experience for teams and customers alike.
Once we have the right tools in place, the next step is to build a data-driven onboarding engine. This involves setting up key performance indicators (KPIs) that align onboarding metrics, like time-to-value and onboarding completion velocity—with broader business goals such as customer lifetime value (CLTV) and revenue retention.
Establishing feedback loops across Customer Success, Product, Sales, Marketing, and Ops ensures we’re continually improving, while tracking data helps us make informed decisions that enhance the customer experience without losing sight of cost-effectiveness.
As companies grow, so must their onboarding processes. Quick fixes might work in the short term, but over time they create “operational debt,” which can hinder scalable success. To support sustainable growth, operational leaders need to take a long-term approach to onboarding, building systems that can expand alongside the company.
Strong operational leadership ensures onboarding systems are scalable, adaptable, and repeatable, making onboarding a competitive advantage rather than a bottleneck. Efficient onboarding not only helps meet growing demand without sacrificing quality but also positions Customer Success as a proactive driver of revenue.
Together, these transformations set the stage for operational excellence that can evolve over time, vs. requiring ongoing transformation, make it easier for new team members to get up to speed as the business grows, consistently, and provide crucial transparency into the health of the business.